Mr. David Lingslay liked his nephew’s open face, and decided that after a bit of fattening up he would make him his right-hand man. But things started to go awry at once. His nephew was an avowed communist, and he began agitating at his uncle’s factories even before he had properly unpacked. Mr. Lingslay received the alarming reports from the sub-directors with a forbearing smile. Wanting to put a stop to the youthful whims of his nephew, he named him secretary general of one of his companies, explaining to him over a long, kindly, and confidential talk that he saw the young man as his partner and heir.
The nephew accepted the position but continued agitating in the factory. It all ended one fine day with the incensed workers occupying the factory and declaring it the property of the Workers’ Committee. The police were called in, and they only just managed to restore order and remove the instigators.
The nephew and uncle had a fiery confrontation, ending with a conclusive parting of ways.
From that time forward, Mr. Lingslay wanted no more to do with his ungrateful nephew, who vanished without a trace.
Until one spring afternoon. On that day a few ringleaders were dismissed, which led to strikes breaking out in fourteen of Lingslay’s factories. On Lingslay’s orders the board of directors closed the factories, tossing all the workers onto the street. The dismissed workers tried to take the factories by force. The army was brought in. The mob expelled from the factory buildings poured out of the alleyways and from all sides, forming a procession that marched toward Mr. David Lingslay’s mansion. The windows rattled.
Caught off guard, Lingslay called in the police. The police commissioner, who was in his pay, asked obligingly if weapons ought to be used. Lingslay grunted laconically into the receiver:
“I think it’s high time we ended this tomfoolery. Your tear gas is useless. The mob expects blank cartridges, and so you won’t get anywhere with them. Two salvos of real ammunition will scatter the demonstrators and teach them a lesson for the future. In any case, that’s your business.”
The commissioner did not disappoint the trust vested in him. Hiding behind a curtain, Mr. David Lingslay watched the police cordon crawl out from a side street as the salvo boomed and the crowd panicked to escape. In the space of five minutes the square was evacuated, with a dozen people left lying motionless on the asphalt.
A moment later the commissioner appeared in Mr. Lingslay’s office, crumpling his immaculately white gloves in visible consternation. It took Lingslay some time to understand the purpose of his visit.
“Your nephew,” stammered the commissioner, “in the front line… We had no way of knowing…”
“Killed?” Mr. Lingslay dryly ventured.
“That’s right…” choked out the commissioner, encouraged by his tone. “Should I order him brought here?”
“By no means!” said Mr. Lingslay, taken aback. “Or actually… quite right… Please have him brought to his room in the left wing.”
Late in the evening, for the first time in a year, Mr. David Lingslay stood in the doorway to his nephew’s room. His nephew lay on the couch. His head was thrown back, and two thin threads of blood ran from the corners of his mouth and trickled onto the expensive carpet.
David Lingslay had seen many faces since then, both living and dead, but this one stayed with him for good, artificially enlarged, nailed amid a hundred odds and ends to the wall of his memory.
He understood everything: the workers’ revolt, the marching against police salvos with their chests exposed. He saw no heroism in it, nothing unusual in the wretched envying the wealthy their wealth. Just raise their salaries and they’d bow their heads and go back to work. It wasn’t even hatred he felt for them, just contempt.
But here all logic ran aground. Lingslay’s nephew, the future heir to his thirty factories, leading a bedraggled, rapacious mob to plunder the riches one day to be his… This Lingslay could not fathom, and his thoughts, accustomed to strolling the lengths of society as if it were his private office, rammed headfirst into an impenetrable wall.
The digits came flowing again in a wide stream, but they couldn’t wipe clean or erase the pale face with wisps of chestnut hair and two threads of blood in the pained corners of his mouth. Nephew Archie, buried in a New York cemetery, in the Lingslay family tomb, clearly mocked the costly marble stones, carrying on his work where he had left off. From the crowd of assailed demonstrators, from the bulletins on the latest strike, from the pages of the morning gazette reporting the revolution in China, from every which way, Mr. David Lingslay felt the gaze of the pale face under the chestnut hair – alert, omnipresent, indestructible.
Sometimes, when Lingslay was reading reports on the workers’ rising demands, when his impatient hand was just reaching for the receiver and his mouth was preparing to bark the order for a lockout, the face of his nephew Archie would emerge from the receiver like a snail from its shell, and he would drop the phone, take up the report once more, make some concessions.
Though not cognizant of this himself, somewhere deep down inside, beneath the unshakable foundations of his “principles” and “convictions,” his nephew Archie remained forever in the small, fireproof safe of his soul as a symbol of disinterested idealism, and whenever Mr. David Lingslay, a crook and plunderer devoid of any scruples, happened to perform a truly disinterested act in some critical situation, his fingers would, unbeknownst even to his own consciousness, touch the doors of this safe, as a Jew does a mezuzah, as if his involuntary pride were seeking sanction from within.
Much like the morning in question, when the gray-bearded Rabbi Eliezer and the corpulent gentleman in horn-rimmed glasses made their business proposal, the immorality of which was beyond question, Lingslay had been inclined to agree; but then his hand reached down to his strongbox and, much to his own surprise, he adamantly refused to comply.
Now, shucked from his clothing, the naked forty-year-old man found himself staring into the void, and with a convulsive scream his hands groped for something around him, something to cling to, something to leave his mark on, to make permanent, in defiance of the inescapability of death and the process of decay, and in this void his hand fell upon the pale face with the mop of chestnut hair, and the forty-year-old man shook as though he had touched a live wire.
Yes, Nephew Archie had known that secret. Smothered by the heavy, expensive slabs of the Lingslay tomb, he had lived an intense, grounded existence. In every square mile around the world, wherever a few hundred ragged and oppressed people assembled, joined by a yearning for a new order, he again shot vital, life-giving sparks.
For the first time his uncle felt the whole burden and poverty of his inhuman solitude, and he understood why his reckless, half-mad nephew had not wanted to inherit his thirty factories…
“Everything will remain the same, they’ll just carry on without me,” Mr. David Lingslay tried to imagine. “The mirror, the commode, the bed, all of it the same. The plague will pass. They’ll disinfect and that will be that. Other people will sleep in this bed, men with women, who knows, maybe even acquaintances of mine. Everyone will see themselves in the mirror. And I won’t leave a trace behind. It’s comical! Or maybe something really does remain of a man after he dies? I’ll have to remember the way I looked.”
Mr. David Lingslay turned the chandelier on bright and looked into the mirror. What he saw terrified him. A forty-year-old man with disheveled, grayish hair stared out at him from the mirror, robe unbuttoned down to his naked chest, his knobby knees touching his chin, his jowls trembling.
“That’s not me, it can’t be me!” stammered a numb Lingslay, unable to locate his impeccable features in the pale, flaccid face of the forty-year-old man.